DirectX 11 will reportedly be finished late this year/early next year and released mid-2009. DX11 hardware is not expected until 2010 with games from mid-2010 onwards. Considering the little use of DX10 so far, it could take even longer and first generation DX11 cards won't be worth bothering with.

There is a third-party company/person who claim(s) to have a downloadable version of DX10 for XP but with this sort of thing you'd be taking big risks using a version not released by Microsoft. Remember: DirectX cannot be rolled back or uninstalled, you'd have to wipe XP off and install it again if you had a major problem.

Intel have announced, amongst other things, that their versions of Solid State Drives (SSDs) will start shipping in 30 days.

For anyone interested, there's plenty of information about SSDs on the internet. In short, they use flash memory and have no moving parts, unlike conventional hard drives.

Intel's SSDs will have a random access time of 0.1ms compared to the standard 8-9ms of a conventional hard drive. Certain Western Digital drives (Raptor and VelociRaptor) run at 10,000RPM rather than 7,200RPM and have an access time of 4-5ms but are far more expensive than their "slower" counterparts.

There are a series of advantages and disadvantages for using SSDs but they are the way forward and though currently rather expensive (Intel won't be drawn on pricing but their drives are meant to be better value-for-money) are excellent for storing the OS as boot-up times are severely reduced.

AMD sell off part of their fabrication business in order to try and remain competitive:

Quote:

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 7 (Reuters) - U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc plans to spin off its manufacturing plants into a $5.7 billion joint venture with Abu Dhabi to get a cash injection and shrink debt to better compete against larger rival Intel Corp.

AMD shares jumped 18 percent to $5 on Tuesday after Wall Street waited for months for the struggling chip maker to formulate its so-called "smart asset" strategy to focus more on chip design and less on costly factories.

Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), an Abu Dhabi state-owned venture capital firm, said it will invest $2.1 billion for a 55.6 percent stake in the venture, of which $700 million will go directly to AMD, which will hold the remaining stake. The two will divide the venture's board seats equally.

ATIC also committed to investing another $3.6 billion to $6.0 billion over 5 years to fund the venture's expansion. The 3,000-person new company will hold AMD's two plants in Dresden, Germany and make all of its central processing units, as well as chips for other companies.

Another Abu Dhabi government company, Mubadala Development Co, will spend $314 million to increase its stake in AMD to 19.3 percent from 8.1 percent and gain a seat on AMD's board.

Brian Mata, an analyst at IC Insights in Arizona, said AMD desperately needed the boost. The company has posted seven consecutive quarters of losses and is forecast by Wall Street to report another quarterly loss next week.

"The key thing is the financial backing from Abu Dhabi because AMD was essentially out of money," said Mata.

He said AMD can focus on design and has the money to try to catch up with Intel, but the new venture has a challenge competing with existing contract chip manufacturers.

Sweey, do you reckon their lack of money being the main reason Intel surpassed them? O_o

Not at all.

When AMD had the lead with their Athlon series, it was clearly noted by all that Intel had two R&D teams and AMD only one. While one Intel R&D team looked into an Athlon competitor, the other one skipped ahead two steps and went for something way into the future. That's where they surpassed AMD whose one R&D team were stuck on Athlon and its immediate successor. AMD have never fully recovered from that which has led to their current position.

My current system is my first Intel one ever. There isn't much difference between stock systems but Intel's CPUs overclock far better than the AMD CPUs.